With more than 450 participants ranging from impact investors, fund managers, scientists and inventors, social enterprise founders and entrepreneurs, students, NGOs, UN officials, and government officials from around the world, Global Solutions Summit 2018 (GSS 2018) convened at United Nations Headquarters in New York City on June 4, 2018. The theme of GSS 2018 was "From the Lab to the Last Mile: Technology Deployment Business Models for the SDGs. The discussion can be summed up by the observation that “It takes more creativity and innovation to market a new invention than it did to invent it in the first place." If that is correct, and we believe that it is, how can we scale up the deployment of proven, cost effective, existing solutions so that they reach tens, if not hundreds of millions of people?

To answer this question, GSS 2018 focused on the organizational, entrepreneurial, financial, sociological and managerial dimensions of scaling technology deployment. It showcased the specific business models and financial mechanisms that NGOs, social enterprises, foundations and others have been using to deploy proven, cost-effective development solutions at scale. Speakers were thoughtful doers -- women and men who are actively working in the field to overcome these deployment challenges – who explained what they have done, how they did it, what went right and what went wrong, where gaps or broken circuits exist in the deployment ecosystem, and what needs to be done to create a more effective and efficient ecosystem that can support the deployment of these innovations on the scale required to achieve the SDGs by 2030. Continue Reading.

Click here to read the Background Discussion PaperClick here to see the AgendaClick here to see the speaker presentationsClick here to see the speaker bios